Chiang Mai

I am very glad I made the switch in hostels. People here are way more outgoing and it is much more comfortable sleeping. Yesterday, I had about a 15 minute walk between them and it was a hot one. It is on average 100 degrees F up in Chiang Mai the last few days. I walk into my hostel and I already know I am not able to check in for about 2 hours, so I am preparing to just hang out in the lobby for a few hours. Stamps, the name of my hostel, has activities going on all the time. So once I walk in there are a bunch of people talking about going to a water park. I decide I will tag along. I let the front desk know that I am here to check in but that I am going on the trip to the water park, I leave my big bag with the front desk and 8 of us pile into the back of the pickup truck taxi. The waterpark is a half hour ride away and is located in the “Grand Canyon” of Thailand. We pull up and I am not totally certain what to expect, both with respect to this “water park” and “Grand Canyon”. We walk up and see a Hollywood looking sign that reads: GRAND CANYON. I suppose the place does resemble the real Grand Canyon, but it is essentially a huge sand pit that has water in the bottom and a bunch of blow up floating water equipment. There were obstacle courses, trampolines into the water, giant inflated igloos to jump off of. They also had a “blob”, the thing like in the movie “Heavyweights” where one person lays on the edge of this huge blow up blob and someone else jumps onto the other end from a high elevation. This launches the first person into the air and into the water, it was pretty hilarious. When we first got there, the power was out for some reason. Some things seemed to be underinflated and the concrete to get down to the water area was way too hot on the feet. After we were messing around for a while, the power must have kicked back on. A sprinkler suddenly turned on which sprayed water around the entire park, they started playing some music and the guys working came over to pump up some of the inflatables. We were already having a good time, but once the power came back on it seemed like the party truly started. We hung out at the water park for about 3 hours and we caught a cab back to the hostel.

Once we got back, 3 of the people I met on the trip (Maddie and Claire both from Wisconsin and Joey from San Francisco) went with me to dinner. After that we caught up with the hostel bar crawl and hung out with several others from the hostel. It technically was a bar crawl, but we only made two stops and it was not all that exciting, which was totally fine since I was tired from climbing and swimming at the water park.

The next morning after breakfast, Angela (from Austin) invited us to join her and her friend Nick as they were going to hang out at a lake about 20 minutes out of town. The 4 of us decided to tag along with them and we made the trek out there. Along the lake edge there were several bamboo huts and we hung around in ours and went swimming. This was definitely not a touristy spot as mostly local Thai people were there with us. It was a nice change of pace to not be doing the stereotypical tourist activities. I am saving those for the next few days. I am just hanging out at the hostel for the rest of the evening as I need to be up early for a trip to an elephant sanctuary tomorrow! Rumor has it that there are 2 baby elephants at this location. It should be a blast!

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